It has removed the hyphen from no fewer than 16,000 words. The spell-check (sorry: spellcheck) on my computer is happy with both. There are fewer letters in that hideous word and think how much time I could have saved typing it.) The texters also have economy on their side.

So in future we are required to spell pigeon-hole, for instance, as pigeonhole and leap-frog as leapfrog. But that's not why I feel betrayed by my precious OED. It has happened because we are changing the way we communicate with each other, which means, says the OED editor Angus Stevenson, that we no longer have time to reach for the hyphen key. No time to make one tiny key-stroke (sorry: key stroke). Are our lives really so pressured, every minute occupied in so many vital tasks, every second accounted for, that we cannot afford the millisecond (no hyphen) it takes to tap that key? No, there's another reason - and it's far more sinister and deeply troubling. It costs almost nothing to send a text message compared with a voice message. I must also concede that some voice messages can be profoundly irritating.

It's partly the physical sensation - the feel and smell of good paper - and partly the minor triumph of finding the word you seek, but it's rare to open a dictionary without being diverted somewhere else.

Scroll down for more The eye falls on a word you've never seen before or one whose meaning you have always wanted to check, and you close the dictionary just a little bit richer for the experience.

But my lifetime love affair with the OED is at risk. " You know the sort of thing; those of us who have survived for years without a mobile phone have to put up with it all the time.

The sixth edition has just been published and - I feel a small shudder as I write these words - it has fallen victim to fashion. Indeed, you may well have functioned perfectly well until now spelling leapfrog without a hyphen. My old friend Amanda Platell, who graces these pages on Saturdays, has an answerphone message that says the caller may leave a message but she'd Of course it should.

They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. " But can that be any more irritating than those absurd little smiley faces with which texters litter their messages?

These EZ Guarantee Loans will help beginning and underserved farmers obtain the capital they need to get their operations off the ground, and they can also be helpful to those who have been farming for some time but need extra help to expand or modernize their operations.

USDA’s Farm Service Agency has offices in nearly every county in the country.

But at least I have not succumbed to 'text-speak' and I wish the OED had not hoisted the white flag either.

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I tried to construct proper, grammatical sentences and used punctuation that would have brought a smile to the lips of that guardian of our language, Lynne Truss.